Jagdish Hansda has faint memories of the village where he grew up.
“Back then, there used to be nothing here except us Adivasis, our fields, jungles and wildlife,” said Hansda, who is now in his late seventies. The village, Jhinjirguttu, was in what was then Bihar, and now falls within Jharkhand. “Some Mulvasi communities also used to live among us,” Hansda added, referring to lower caste communities native to the region.
The village of Hansda’s childhood does not exist today because in the late 1950s, the Bihar government displaced its residents to set up the Chandrapura Thermal Power Station, now situated in Jharkhand’s Bokaro district. The power station is spread over 1,800 acres of land in Chandrapura, of which around 1,200 acres was acquired from locals.
On the evening of December 13, I met Jagdish and his peers at a tea stall in Chandrapura town. A thin smog hung around us as we sipped our tea. In the backdrop, a red-and-white chimney of the Chandrapura Thermal Power Station loomed over us, intermittently blinking red lights in the dark.
“We were displaced in 1959,” Hansda said. “I remember hordes of villagers left the area in vast numbers because they were terrified.”
He recounted that the villagers would say, “Sarkar aa rahi hai” –...
from Scroll.in https://scroll.in/article/1090290/why-adivasis-displaced-by-indias-first-thermal-power-plant-still-depend-on-stolen-electricity?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=public https://sc0.blr1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/article/211687-rfhbydcpxr-1769581584.jpeg
via
0 Comments